Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
                 2 Corinthians 4:17 RSV

It was some years later that John and I stayed with our friends Michael and Jeanne Harper at an English retreat house near the site where Dame Julian of Norwich lived her self-imposed incarceration. And there I first encountered the writings of this fourteenth-century mystic.

Like her contemporary, St. Catherine, whose footsteps I'd traced in Siena, Julian lived through the terrible years of the Hundred Years' War. Catherine had confronted the evils of the day with outward action; Julian battled them with prayer, shutting herself away in a sealed cell attached to a church. Church and cell were destroyed by a bomb during World War II, but these were the fields, the hills, from which she'd shut herself off, to fast and intercede for a suffering world.

In Showings, that classic of Christian devotion, Julian recorded the revelations received in prayer. All are summed up in a single statement:

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Had Julian too, I wondered, seen the visible world break open to reveal the joy at its root? Is what, for me, was a fleeting one-time impression, for the saints a common experience? Even, for them, a constant perception, the insight that makes their lives of extraordinary endurance possible?

"The joy of the Lord is your strength," Nehemiah told the Israelites, in what once seemed to me a poetic outburst. But maybe the man who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in the face of ridicule and plots against his life was simply reporting a fact. Perhaps when he looked at the "hopelessly" ruined walls, he didn't see heaps of burned rubble. Perhaps he saw the joy vibrating beneath appearance and drew his strength from the sight.

Or when, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, Jesus endured the cross "for the joy that was set before him" - perhaps the joy was literally before his eyes.

Intimations of heaven! Like the lavender leaves my grandmother sprinkled in her hope chest, remembering keeps them fresh. That momentary sighting of a reality beyond sight, in the driveway at Wain-wright house, remained so vivid over the decades that when I began reading about the superstring theory, it was with a shiver almost of recognition.

The theory, for a nonscientist like me, is bewilderingly complex, involving an unimaginable nine-dimensional universe. As George Johnson wrote in the New York Times in April 2000, "Human brains are not wired to picture a world beyond the familiar three dimensions of space." But picturable or not, physicists believe this may be the longsought "Unified Theory of Everything," from the smallest subatomic particle to the farthest galaxy.